A social media audit is an essential part of any good marketing plan. 

Knowing how and when to conduct an audit helps you plan the future of your social media marketing tactics and formulate a strategy specific to your accounts. 

An audit will give you insights about your audience, what content is performing well (and what isn't), new growth opportunities, and what your competitors are doing on the platform. 

What is a social media audit?

A social media audit involves compiling information about your social media accounts and assessing their performance.

Essentially, you're conducting a "check-up" on your social media accounts and evaluating what's working and not. 

We've put together four easy steps to conducting a social media audit.

1. Check in with your profiles

First things first, open up all of your social media accounts and review your profile. Is your bio still relevant and accurate to the business? Is it consistent across all platforms? What does it say about your business?

A bio on any social media account is essential to inform viewers about your business and your core value-adding points. For example, if you're conducting an audit for a hospitality venue, you'll likely want to include your location, opening hours, what coffee blend you use etc. You need to ensure you're sharing important information with your audience.

Take the time to thoroughly look at each account to make sure it's consistent with your current branding. Try and view it as if you're a new visitor to your profile and see how easy it is to navigate/understand from that perspective.

2. Identify what's working and what's not

It's time to delve into your analytics and review how your content is performing.

Make a note of your top-performing posts and see if you can find a trend. Are they all educational posts? Are they lifestyle posts? Once you make this connection, note it down, so you know what type of content to focus on in your future content planning. 

It's also important to note your lowest-performing posts and find a trend between them. It could be the time of day you posted, the quality of the imagery, or the caption could be unengaging. 

Although it can be difficult to critique your content this way, it's important to know what your audience is engaging with and what they aren't.

Over time, as you track the performance of your posts, you'll start to refine your social strategy and learn how best to connect with your audience.

3. Evaluate the overall performance 

Evaluate how your channels are performing overall. Are they growing as much as you aimed for? Are they meeting the goals you've set? 

If you haven't set goals for your social media presence, this is the time to do it. Be realistic with this goal setting, and ensure they're relevant to each channel.

Not all goals have to be centred around growing a large following. Instead, they can be directed towards engaging with your audience.

Remember to set clear performance indicators that are measurable and trackable for future audits so you can see how your channels are progressing. 

4. Rinse and repeat

For a social media audit to be helpful and give guidance to your strategy and marketing plan, it needs to be done regularly. 

This isn't a one-off exercise; it needs to be repeated to keep your accounts on track and meet your set goals. 

We recommend conducting a social media audit quarterly, as this time frame allows your new strategy to take effect, and you can see how the changes you made last time impacted the data.

We recommend using Excel (or an equivalent platform) to note down all of the information you find.

This makes it much easier for you to keep track of your data and have it all in one place for future audits. 

Social media audits don't have to be scary or difficult; simply gather your data, make changes where you need to and track it!